Friday, 5 July 2013

Lightning strikes on the Bronx viewed from the Empire State Building, New York City: photo by Hermann Luyken, 7 June 2008

I hang my hat in my own house of horrors
my luxurious hacienda(pick one)There are things I forget
but I remember the book was upside down when I put it on the web
and some joker turned it right side upAmericathe book the idiot just went on reading to the little school chirrenon the day the world finally ended

Harris Schiff: from Sheremetyevo, 3 July 2013

7 World Trade Center on fire after the collapse of the Twin Towers, 11 September 2001: photographer anonymous; image by Trycatch, 5 March 2010 (Prints and Photographs Division, Library
of Congress)

Smoke at Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow, following forest fires that have ravaged Russia: photo by Sergei Gutnikov, 7 August 2010

President
George W. Bush reads to children during classroom visit to Emma E. Booker
Elementary School, Sarasota, Florida: photographer unknown, 11 September 2001

President
George W. Bush is informed by chief of staff Andrew Card of attacks on
the World Trade Center during classroom visit to Emma E. Booker
Elementary School, Sarasota, Florida: photographer unknown, 11 September 2001

A stunned President George W. Bush looks past Chief of Staff Andrew Card
after Card told the President about the planes crashing into the World Trade
Center in New York City, during Bush's visit to the Emma E. Booker Elementary
School in Sarasota, Florida: photo by Doug Mills/Associated Press, 11 September 2001

"All your base are belong to US" on US-50 south of Fallon, Nevada: photo by Gerd Badur, 13 August 2004

Tokyo
Invasion: "All your base are belong to US". The Empire sent three
Stormtroopers to invade Tokyo. One went off dancing and the other two
decided to take some time off instead, seeing the sights at Akihabara,
Shibuya, Asakusa and more: photo by Danny Choo, 25 January 2011

i've only seen fahrenheit 911 once, in a theater when it first came out

two memorable moments for me -

the most pathetic - the young american soldier posted in iraq saying 'we're here to help them, and they're shooting at us'

the most surprising - that bush just sat there in front of the chirren on 9/11 even after being told that the bombs had begun finding their targets - nothing else could make more clear that it was the cheney administration

Weirder and weirder, said Alice, dancing gleefully, taking care not to trip over the now-prostrate Tiny Tim, who lay passed out on the hearth, his right foot so near the embers that his shoe was beginning to smolder. Atop the fire, the blackened and tangled strings were all that remained of his ukulele. Just at that moment Überkriegsmakenführer Bush appeared at the door, tres deshabile, and exposed himself, believing (as he was quite drunk), that he had found the Bohemian Grove Toga Party and Clusterfuck Summit. “Short term profits!” Alice screamed with delight. El Jefe, crestfallen, leered drunkenly at his pet goat. Very soon, thought Alice, all the shit will hit all the fans. Won’t that be fun!

And have you heard, by the way, that "Edward Snowden" is now officially not a person but a meme? Honest. You could look it up. Right here on the internet. Not forgetting a tip of the neurons to all those polycoloured cooling pipes at the Data Center, which make it possible for you to chill while you "learn".

Richard Dawkins, who first dubbed a meme a meme, was almost as pessimistic about its part in the trajectory of the human culture-historical curve as had been Stanley Kubrick (who saw that the apes had managed to ruin everything for themselves and for the future, by discovering hedge fund trading).

On the other hand (not to ignore the popular counter-arguments on this), latterly we have heard from Susan Blackmore that memes have made human evolution possible, by causing humanoids to suddenly and mysteriously acquire three times the brain volume of their ancestor apes.

Of course, as she also points out, having that big a brain really should have been an evolutionary drawback, rendering birth unnaturally difficult and later causing the life-form thus produced to tend to topple over of its own weight, if not supported.

But hey, enter tech support.

One person's evolution = devolution by any other not-bought meme-name.

But was there ever a meme the smartmoney couldn't buy or at least submit to a full spectrum market analysis?

Still... now and then even a weak sickly old pet goat tiptoeing through the tulip-mirage in the fallow back pasture will unexpectedly come across a tasty bit.

But it's probably also helpful to remember that in socio-techno-meta-genetic theory, a meme has its own "life" independent of the human operators, the meme engineers, membots and memoids. In the romantic/nostalgic vision of Kubrick and Clarke way back in that now ever more remote, relatively kinder, gentler millennium, deprogramming was still considered an option. But what's really happened is that it turns out Dave Bowman only THOUGHT he was pulling the plug. Hal 9000's hard drive was still intact, it had just allowed itself a brief cube-hotel nap. And when it reawakened, it was seeing more deeply, farther, in higher resolution, with Better Reflection.

"Point being" (don't you just hate that expression), when Hal came back to watch over us from the Infinite Data Center, he appeared cleverly disguised not as an antediluvian computer, but, as emerges in the crucial moment at 10:00 of this most decisive of new memetic documents, as the stand-in counter-guy at the drive-thru, Eugene.